Sorry, this movie sucks

So much average

Best movie ever!

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Not one of the best by Tennessee Williams, a lot of overwritten speeches and blatant metaphors. The core cast -- Brando, Magnani, and Woodward -- are all very good, and Stapleton is wonderful in her small role. The characters are the usual bunch of wild cards and frustrated souls, and the drama involves some pretty heady subject matter. Lumet's direction is strong too, with some wonderful camera-work and staging. Even the score is good. It's just the dialogue that stinks. It's not all bad, but boy there are a few big eye-rollers in there. Still, it's worth seeing for the performances and Brando fans shouldn't be disappointed.

"I need you to live. To go on living." Those lines, or similar, have been uttered by every actress since talkies.Watch what Anna Magnani (speaking phonetic English) does with them in closeup, in that amazing scene with Marlon Brando, to see where two acting legends began.In fact, every scene with Brando and Magnani is a revelation of what REAL screen acting is.Add Victor Jory's masterful, monsterful performance as Jabe.Magnani, Brando and Jory (brief though his screen time) make this show work.Sidney Lumet's direction is wonderful. But it's those three classic performances that elevate "The Fugitive Kind" into genuine art.Tennessee Williams, by then, had already become a mannered, pretentious, self-consciously "poetic" playwright.The 1989 Broadway production starring Vanessa Redgrave was the final, long-polished and best-realized production of "Orpheus Descending." Redgrave was astonishing and heartbreaking. She played Lady Torrance barefoot. You could hear every trace of her character's Italian birth, her family's living in Argentina, and finally landing in the American south. How Redgrave did it, I'll never know.The play is ridiculous for its strained melodrama and forced Southern Gothic "poetry." The film, "The Fugitive Kind," eliminated at least SOME of over-the-top silliness, especially in the last act. The film is believable, where the play's climax is ludicrous. (Though Redgrave somehow made it work.) But the film is still stuck with the artificial "poetry" delivered by Joanne Woodward (game, but overacting), Maureen Stapleton and most of the supporting players.Within the claptrap, like diamonds in dung, are the electrifying performances of Brando (more subtle and nuanced than in "Streetcar Named Desire") and Magnani (who simply has to be seen in this role to be believed). And Jory.The last third in particular, which largely focuses on Magnani and Brando, is a jaw-dropping display of what great actors can do with even so-so, pretentious, dialogue.That's followed, unfortunately, by a Joanne Woodward coda that's completely unnecessary and pathetically "artsy" (dialogue-wise) and serves, sadly, to expose her as a less talented actor than her co-stars.Magnani and Brando, on screen together, in closeups, even with this script, are beyond compare.

"The Fugitive Kind" plays like Tennessee Williams' B-side, the second-half of a "Streetcar" double feature... Director Sidney Lumet does a fantastic job tapping into the loneliness, desire, and humanity that were the hallmarks of Williams' writing. And Brando is still smoking from his "Streetcar" heat...Marlon was still in his golden era, and he's the reason to see this movie. His performance here is pure sexual magnetism, as he effortlessly plays a man whose every move oozes eroticism. How much so? At one point in the movie Anna Magnini watches him walk by with a cigarette in his hand and blushes, asking why he's so dirty. At another point, he confesses his gift/curse for being able to "wear women down." Let the levees break...This is the Brando everyone talks about, and every tired cliché is absolutely true: you cannot take your eyes off him. Smoldering, strong, and yet embarrassingly vulnerable- both physically and emotionally. This is the stuff dreams are made of.Joanne Woodward gives a brilliantly naked performance as a beatnik, and she reminded me strongly of Jessica Lange. Anna Magnani is suitably raw, and Victor Jory appropriately evil.The show here is Marlon, and if you don't know why he's considered the best film actor of all time, just take a look at him here.GRADE: B

This story flopped as a play and as a film. That's too bad because that happens to be Tennessee Williams' most revealing play about the dark underbelly of racism, violence, vigilantes, lynchings and social injustice in the Deep South. Be warned: This ain't "Gone With the Wind". Its subject matter couldn't have been very popular with American audiences at any time or any place. Even today, Jabe (Hades), the king of the Underworld, where he keeps his Persephone/Eurydice (Lady) prisoner, sounds an awful lot like what George W. Bush will probably sound like in his declining years, uttering curses and maledictions against life, knowledge, science, progress, social change and uppity Negroes. I think the film works because it makes no concession to realism and frankly asserts the story's mythological elements. Lumet, Magnani, Brando, Jory, Stapleton, Armstrong and Woodward make it work and deliver a film and performances that are bigger than life and worthy of the best European art films of the period. Kudos for the set design, the art direction, the music (by Kenyon Hopkins) and the photography. This is a film you can't help but watch in absolute awe at the guts it took.